A new Cuomo takes the key

Rex Smith Editor

Published 12:00 am, Sunday, January 2, 2011

One afternoon 20-some years ago, Mario Cuomo, the governor, and Andrew Cuomo, a lawyer, were playing a one-on-one basketball game at the Executive Mansion. This presented a difficult situation for their chosen referee, a young Albany Academy student, Christopher Cuomo, son and little brother of the contestants.

What I mean to say, with what some readers will recognize as restraint, is that the now-former governor and the now-current governor are both rather aggressive competitors. No wonder their referee wound up choosing a career in broadcast journalism instead of politics. Family gatherings are surely friendlier since he picked a field where you're supposed to be fair to all sides rather than stomp 'em.

But back to the game, which was reported to a few people the next day by the father. (Make your own judgments about the credibility of this account; no effort was made to get the other two witnesses to confirm it.)

As New York's 52nd governor drove toward the basket, the son who would become New York's 56th governor blocked him so hard that the older man fell to the ground on his belly, with the younger man flopping on top of him.

Andrew Cuomo isn't into basketball the way his father was; he is unlikely to regale reporters with tales of pick-up games at the mansion. But we have to hope that the toughness our new governor was willing to display in a friendly father-son contest in the 1980s will characterize the term he began yesterday. Few who know Andrew Cuomo would doubt it.

A guy I know who, like me, has been tracking this state's politics as a journalist for 30 years, said to me the other day, "The good thing is that nobody in the state is better qualified to be governor than Andrew Cuomo." Better qualified, I would add, to be the kind of governor we need now.

Mario Cuomo took office as the nation was struggling to emerge from a recession and as his party was trying to find its footing in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan's move into the White House. He presented a vision that was a stark contrast to the government-is-the-problem mantra of Reganism, often evoking the memory of the activist government of Franklin D. Roosevelt, "who lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees," as the governor often said.

In the face of an ideological shift in the nation's dominant political consciousness, the eloquence of Mario Cuomo was a bracing reminder of an alternate view.

In the 1980s, New Yorkers benefitted from the leadership of a governor who could remind us of our responsibility as citizens in the face of society's divisions. It was during Mario Cuomo's term that the scourges of HIV/AIDS and crack cocaine emerged, severely testing our social conscience and our resolve to bring justice.

The 52nd governor was lucky that the beginning of his tenure coincided with able leadership of the state Legislature: the wily Warren Anderson for the Republicans, the brilliant Stanley Fink heading the Democrats. The Legislature that greets the 56th governor is not as agile, its leadership not as secure. That makes the younger Cuomo's job harder.

But his task now isn't as much to inspire us -- a role his father could handle better, anyway -- as it is to dig into solutions to intractable problems and push reluctant officials yield to new realities. We can't afford all the government we have, though we like all its services. We need hard analysis followed by deep restructuring, a task that will require some tough choices and aggressive actions. It's not a time for a rhetoritician; we need a smart professional politician to remake a system that isn't performing.

It's a job that exactly matches Andrew Cuomo's capacity. In fact, this can only be done by a scion of Democratic liberalism, in the same way that it took a product of Republican conservatism, Richard Nixon, to open U.S. relations with China and create the Environmental Protection Agency.

Instead of basketball, a game of elegant if hard-driving athleticism, the new governor spends his little free time beneath car hoods. He is an extraordinary mechanic. He has restored several deteriorating classics -- a 1968 Pontiac GTO, a 1975 Corvette, among others -- to their original sleekness.

The metaphor is almost too apt. We are less in need of a perfect arc from the key than a clean rebuild. Now, armed with the tools voters have given him, we'll see what kind of a mechanic Andrew Cuomo really is.